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1. BIOGRAPHY MATTERS

The single largest information resource is `A Compendium of Communist Biographies' (see tab on left), an `encylopaedia' of hundreds of thousands of words on many thousands (mainly but not all deceased) of Communist Party members and former members. New information and corrections on individuals from readers is always welcome. These biographies have been written and researched by Graham Stevenson but a few have been supplied by individuals, named in the entry concerned.

3. MOVEMENT MATTERS

4. HISTORY MATTERS

The 330,000 word study, `Defence or Defiance - a people's history of Derbyshire' (see tab on right middle) - first written by Graham Stevenson in 1982. This is a history of trade unions and other working class organisations in the county from the 17th century to the early 1970s. The first quarter of this is now available as a printed book from Manifesto Press - click link: https://goo.gl/jq7QMG

`The miners' strike 20 years on and the Communist Party (2004)

The ETU and the Communist Party

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Graham Stevenson was for many decades a senior official of the Transport & General Workers Union and its successor, Unite the Union, covering the transport industries at a national and international level. He is a former President of the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF) and is currently National Trade Union Organiser for the Communist Party of Britain and a member of its Executive Committee and Political Committee.

This is his personal website, containing many historical resources written or edited by him. There are Communist biographies, a study of Derbyshire, the story of Spartacus, the Young Communist League, and many pieces on the struggles of the past, along with political and historical materials and illustrations. Here is a brief note of personal history:

I first made contact with the Communist Party in Coventry in 1966, just having turned the age of 16, having counted myself as a Communist for well over a year and a half before that, after reading about Marxism and then finding the Morning Star and other allied Communist publications. Although there was no formal local organisation to join during 1965 and 1966 and I was under the age of being able to join the Communist Party, I was at last was able to formally join the Young Communist League in January 1967 and became Coventry Branch Secretary within a few months. I was initially co-opted onto the Midlands YCL District Committee in May 1968 and was formally elected a member at the District Congress in 1969. I remained a member until May 1978, being a member of the District Executive or Secretariat for all that time. At the 1969 YCL District Congress, I was Chair of the Standing Orders Committee.

In February 1972 I moved to Birmingham to become the Midlands YCL District Secretary. During my period in Coventry, I was a member of the Draughtsmen’s and Allied Technicians Association Coventry Divisional Council from 1968 and also both the local and National Youth Committee of DATA. I was active in the local Trades Councils and their youth committees in a number of towns across the years. During the 1970s, I was active in the building industry national strike of 1972 in Birmingham and, unlike others elsewhere, was lucky to be found not guilty of conspiracy to trespass in a major case arising from these activities. In 1974, after beginning retraining as a capstan-lathe setter/operator, I joined the Transport and General Workers Union. In the mid to late 1970s, I worked for BSA Guns and was the elected secretary of the Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee there.

After its defeat in the early 1950s, a process of its leading politicians beginning to simply follow the same broad ideological thrust as the Tories had seemingly delivered the electoral party of the working class virtually wholesale to Tory politics.

A left opposition of sorts did exist in the Parliamentary Labour Party but it was very much focused on leading individuals. Nye Bevan had been clearly on the left in the House of Commons during the war. After the landslide Labour victory in the 1945 general election, he was appointed Minister of Health, responsible for establishing the National Health Service. In 1951, Bevan was moved to become Minister of Labour and National Service. Shortly afterwards he resigned from the government in protest at the introduction of prescription charges for dental care and spectacles. His resignation, along with others was in protest at Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell's, introduction of charges imposed in order to meet the financial demands imposed by the Korean War. Bevan effectively led the left wing of the Labour Party for the next five years.

In the meantime, and contrary to much retrospective suggestion, Tory politics began to shift away from the war-time consensus. In 1953, the end to the BBC’s monopoly on broadcasting was signalled with the passing of legislation that would result in the appearance of ITV. The same year, sweet rationing but not sugar rationing ended, followed the next year by the complete abolition after fourteen years of food rationing in Britain when restrictions on the sale and purchase of meat and bacon were finally lifted. Communists argued that all that the Tories had done was to “abolish rationing by the book - only to replace it by rationing by the purse”. [Communist Party, `A policy for Britain: general election manifesto’, (1955)]